Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 by Robert Kelly

 Nobody could ever like or dislike the poetry of Robert Kelly because it is this or that kind of poetry. His poetry is simply too various to make that sort of categorical judgement possible. He writes different kinds of poems over the thirty-three years covered in this book, but but also within each of those thirty-three years. For example, drawn from a 1978 book called Convections we find exquisite observations of nature, as in the first stanza of "The Acquisition":

    I saw the web resplendent strung

    in the crotch of a prostrate bay tree

    so what little sunlight filtered down

    through redwoods found its way here,

    to be proclaimed & multiplied upon the strands

    moulded by a small body, its house and instrument. 

But we also find in the same book more elliptical, more cryptic offerings:

    The Last Religion

    and the pier

    widened

    so that the Dead

    in all their difference

    could board

    that single boat. 

This seems to evoke Charon's raft. This sort of appeal to mythology, but also elsewhere to religion, science, music, literature, and the rest of the best of what humans have done is also characteristic of Kelly's work. In his poems we are in the company of a well-stocked mind.

Kelly is prolific. Even he probably doesn't know how many books he has written (some are chapbooks, some more substantial). He is ninety years old now, and Wikipedia suggests that his last book was published in 2020. Wikipedia may be wrong.

His work is widely available all over the Internet, and whole chapbooks can be downloaded for free here.